Growing PWHL’s post-Olympics boom is just what women’s hockey needed

The 2026 Milan Winter Olympics, which culminated in a U.S.-Canada gold medal game that set viewership records across the U.S., thrust women’s hockey into the spotlight like it hasn’t been before. The Professional Women’s Hockey League has spent much of the last three years positioning itself to capitalize on the momentum to build a sustainable women’s hockey league.

“Every Olympic year, there would be some boost in excitement and interest around the women’s game,” said Jayna Hefford, executive vice president of hockey operations for the PWHL, who won five Olympic medals playing for Team Canada. “When I think about where we are now, it’s sort of exponential from that.”

Despite the recent success of women’s sports and leagues like the WNBA and NWSL, women’s hockey leagues have struggled to find a similar footing, and that is even with the Olympic success of the U.S. and Canadian teams. Since women’s ice hockey was introduced as an Olympic sport in 1998, Canada has won five of the eight gold medals, with the U.S. winning the other three, including a 2-1 overtime win at the 2026 Games.

Several previous attempts to launch women’s hockey leagues in North America have failed, often due to financial difficulties. While the WNBA is partially owned and subsidized by the NBA, the NHL has not historically provided financial support for a women’s league, and many of those organizations have struggled to pay players sustainable wages. In 2019, many of the top women’s players boycotted the existing professional leagues in a fight for better resources.

But that landscape shifted in 2023 with the launch of the PWHL. The league is privately funded by Mark Walter, the billionaire Guggenheim Partners co-founder and CEO, who over the last few years has become one of the largest sports investors with controlling stakes in MLB’s Los Angeles Dodgers, the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers, the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks, and motorsports organization Andretti Global. Walter, who acquired the rights of another women’s hockey league as part of the PWHL’s launch, also brought on tennis legend Billie Jean King and her partner Ilana Kloss as members of the PWHL’s advisory board.

Despite a short timeline (the league was announced in August 2023 and played its first game on Jan. 1, 2024), the PWHL has seen success over its first three seasons. The now-eight-team league has drawn fans across North America, set multiple attendance records, attracted major sponsors, and, perhaps most importantly, was a platform for the best women’s hockey players in the world as they prepared for the 2026 Winter Olympics.

The league prepared for the stage the 2026 Winter Olympics would provide.

“We understood it was going to put a camera on our league, unlike anything else,” said Stan Kasten, Los Angeles Dodgers president and CEO and a member of the PWHL advisory board.

When the Olympic rosters were announced, 61 of the league’s roughly 184 players were named to national teams, with 39 of those players appearing in the gold medal game.

“Right then, we talked about it: it’s going to require extra budget, it’s going to require extra people, let’s get a facility in Milan and prepare to take sponsors, investors, and a world of assembled media who are all seeing the foremost women’s hockey league in the world for the first time,” Kasten said. “We thought about it as a launch pad for our next wave of interest. I have to tell you, like with a lot of things from the first day we started this league, I could not have predicted it would turn out this well.”

The Olympic momentum has carried over into arenas. The PWHL set a new U.S. arena record with 17,335 fans at the first-ever sellout of Climate Pledge Arena in Seattle on Feb. 27, marking the third time the league set a new attendance record this season alone. The first weekend the league returned to play, it set a new league weekend attendance record with 49,343 fans.

In total, attendance through 71 games of the 2025-2026 PWHL season was at 616,795 fans, an average of 8,687 and a 20% increase compared to the previous season.

During the month of February, merchandise sales were up 101% compared to the sales prior to the Olympics. The PWHL saw its video views on YouTube, where it predominantly broadcasts games, increase 200% over the Olympics period. It also saw traffic to its website grow by six times during the Olympics period, with 73% of website traffic coming from new users.

“It’s great to see the numbers today, but the hard work actually starts now,” said Amy Scheer, PWHL executive vice president of business operations. “We’ve got these fans, we’ve got these new followers, we’ve got this attention, now what do we do with it?”

For Scheer, who was named to the 2026 CNBC Changemakers list alongside Hefford, that means helping the league take its next big steps on the commercial side, pushing for higher valuation sponsorships and major media rights deals. “We’re looking to strike while the iron is hot, and the value proposition has changed for us,” she said. The league has more than 75 corporate sponsors now, and the PWHL recently signed a partnership with Oak View Group to help it secure additional deals.

In March, the PWHL signed a deal with Scripps Sports to broadcast the league’s Walter Cup Finals on Ion, which will mark the first time it will be aired across the U.S. on a linear network. Ion also aired a game on March 28, marking the league’s first nationally televised game. Scheer said the league is in talks with a variety of partners over potential media rights deals for next season, declining to provide additional details.

The increase in popularity is helping the league fill bigger and bigger arenas, and in cities where there is not a PWHL team. Since it launched, the PWHL has used a “Takeover Tour” barnstorming strategy to play some games outside of home arenas to test new markets or try to fill up larger arenas.

That strategy will be on display on Saturday when the New York Sirens, who normally play at the Prudential Center in Newark, home of the NHL’s New Jersey Devils, will play at Madison Square Garden versus the Seattle Torrent. The game has already been marked as a sell-out of the more than 18,000-seat arena.

The league has also sold out a scheduled game at TD Garden in Boston on April 11 between the Boston Fleet and the Montreal Victoire. That arena seats more than 17,800 people.

Scheer said that on previous stops of the league’s Takeover Tours, upwards of 60% of the fans attending had never been to an NHL game at those arenas. That is informing the league’s expansion strategy, with plans to add as many as four new teams next season.

“The list of cities that want us is as long as any list you could have,” Kasten said. “The problem we have, particularly in American cities, is that the most appropriate venue for us is no longer the 5,000- or 6,000-seat arena; it’s the big venues, and they don’t have dates for us. I’ve talked to the NHL teams in those buildings, and the owners of those buildings, and finding dates is our biggest issue now in cities.”

All of these things add up as the PWHL looks to be a sustainable – and ultimately profitable — league. Kasten said the league has outpaced its expense projections each season, but that “it has always matched the growth in revenue, so it turned out to be worth it.”

“The revenue growth has been consistent, and next year it’s going to take another jump,” he said. “We’re still in the red again, but that’s what we planned for, and the gap is closing.”

The league signed a CBA with its players through 2031, and it hopes to be profitable by that point.

Kasten said there are no current plans to sell teams to individual owners, but there has been some recent talk about bringing on additional investors, especially as more people approach the league looking for attractive sports opportunities.

Hefford said that as she’s watched the league grow, “it’s much different than anything that’s ever existed before, and people understand that.” Hefford herself played in previous professional women’s hockey league iterations and also served as a commissioner, and she said the PWHL has the opportunity to offer players and fans something those other leagues hadn’t.

“For a long time, it was always about the national teams, and now I think we’re seeing a shift where there’s a loyalty towards the PWHL teams and the communities,” she said. “National teams will always be an incredible opportunity, but there’s just so much more now that they can be excited about as well.”

When Laura Stacey returned from the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing after playing for Canada, she said she had to ask herself a tough question.

“You come back, it’s like, ‘What’s next? Where do I go? Do I keep going for another four years?” she said. “It’s this four-year cycle situation of players thinking if they can afford to continue taking on an Olympic dream.”

Stacey said that the Olympics have always been the “pinnacle” for women’s hockey players, a dream that she’s been able to live three times, including winning two gold medals.

“The fact that now we get to play all year long, every single year in an incredible league, and then every four years, players who are at the top of their game get a chance to represent their countries at the Olympics and then come back and still have this professional league behind them, it’s just incredible,” she said.

Still, there is work to do. Stacey, who is the president of the players’ association, said the players are working closely with the league to make sure facilities and other aspects of the player experience remain high as the league expands. The players also want to see salaries grow as the league does – league average salaries are roughly $55,000, according to the CBA.

Kasten said the league is pushing for more visibility and coverage. Currently, the league’s scores are not highlighted on ESPN’s app or its website.

Scheer said while she no longer has to educate potential sponsors about what the PWHL is or why women’s hockey is an attractive opportunity, the conversation is now shifting to asking supposed supporters to “put your money where your mouth is.”

Hefford said while the league has launched several initiatives encouraging young girls to play hockey, there is still plenty to do to encourage the next generation of PWHL stars and fans.

However, Stacey said it is not lost on her or the players that the PWHL has already made significant progress.

“We’ve had every version [of a league], and they all have not worked out for many various reasons until now. But none of that was even close to where we’re at now,” she said. “So for us, it’s like we’re here. We’ve made it. This has been created now. We need to do whatever we possibly can to make sure that this is bigger, better, stronger when we all leave.”